shing this for an instant aside, he faced next the question of his
arrest. There was no one, save his father, for whom he need think. He
would send his father word saying--"I have killed a beast--fairly--in
the open"--that would be all.

He would not be hanged--poison should see to that. Dunes had murdered,
raped, tortured--never yet had they died on the gallows.

And now, for the first time, the suspicion crossed his mind that
perhaps, after all, he might escape--escape, at any rate, that order of
punishment. Here on this desolate road, he had met no living soul; the
mists encompassed him and they had now swallowed the dripping wood and
all that it contained. It had always been supposed that he was good
friends with Carfax, as good friends as he allowed himself to be with
any one. No one had known in which direction he would take his walk;
he had come upon Carfax entirely by chance. It might quite naturally be
supposed that some tramp had attempted robbery. To the world at large
Olva could have had no possible motive. But, for the moment, these
thoughts were dismissed. It seemed to him just now immaterial whether he
lived or died. Life had not hitherto been so wonderful a discovery
that the making of it had been entirely worth while. He had no tenor of
disgrace; his father was his only court of appeal, and that old rocky
sinner, sitting alone with his proud spirit and his grey hairs, in his
northern fastness, hating and despising the world, would himself slay,
had he the opportunity, as many men of the Carfax kind as he could find.
He had no terror of pain--he did not know what that kind of fear was.
The Dunes had always faced Death.

But he began, dimly, now to perceive that there were larger, crueller
issues before him than these material punishments. He had known since
he was a tiny child a picture by some Spanish painter, whose name he had
forgotten, that had always hung on the wall of the passage opposite his
bedroom. It was a large engraving in sharply contrasted black and white,
of a knight who rode through mists along a climbing road up into
the heart of towering hills. The mountains bad an active life in the
picture; they seemed to crowd forward eager to swallow him. Beside the
spectre horse that he rode there was no other life. The knight's face,
white beneath his black helmet, was tired and worn. About him was the
terror of loneliness.

From his earliest years this idea of loneliness had pleasantly seized